Melissa Harris

Columnist

Melissa Harris left the Chicago Tribune in 2015, after serving as a business columnist since 2009. Before joining the Chicago Tribune Harris spent nearly five years as an award-winning metro reporter at The Baltimore Sun. Prior to joining the Sun, she was a metro reporter at The Orlando Sentinel. She is a graduate of Northwestern and Johns Hopkins universities (Bachelor of Science in journalism and Master of Arts in government), and a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award, honoring outstanding reporting by journalists younger than 35. She is working toward a Master of Business Administration at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

Recent Articles

While Volkswagen's efforts to stymie emissions tests around the world might seem stunning, VW's case isn't the first time a manufacturer has tried this. Or the second. Or the third. Or ... In 1998, seven large diesel-engine makers — including Caterpillar, Navistar and Cummins — settled Justice...

By now Donald Trump has informed most of us that Mondelez International, headquartered in Deerfield, will move some of its Oreo and other cookie production from Chicago to Mexico, resulting in 600 layoffs at its Southwest Side bakery next year. These production lines are headed to a large industrial...

I was shopping at the Blackhawks store on North Michigan Avenue a few weeks ago when a salesman informed me that sales taxes were included in the price of every item in the store. So a ball cap tagged as $20 would cost $20 at the register. Not $21.85 at the current 9.25 percent sales tax rate....

The last time Theaster Gates walked me through the abandoned bank at East 68th Street and South Stony Island Avenue, water dripped from the ceiling, clouds wafted over a hole in the roof, and shards of glass and scraps of plaster crunched under his feet. The 42-year-old Chicago artist will debut...

The hardest assignment of business school thus far: Take a Chicago Booth disposable pen and, through a series of sales or trades over five days, end up with something of greater value. Students must document and photograph the five transactions. And the deals must be consummated with strangers....

I applied to the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business — and Booth only — to participate in the school’s New Venture Challenge, the nation’s top university-based startup accelerator. Alumni include Braintree, which sold for $800 million to Ebay; GrubHub, which went public last year;...

During his junior year of high school, Matthew Brewer would get to skip school one day a month and go somewhere he had never been. He remembers shaking hands and snapping a photo with Mayor Richard M. Daley at City Hall. He remembers a very intense discussion about race at the Chicago Community Trust....

Readers accused me of being a cheerleader for City Hall after my Sunday column listed 34 signs that this is the decade of the city. I reject that label. I am, however, an unabashed cheerleader for this city — as much as reader Paul is a cheerleader for the suburb of Elmhurst. His comments begin...